With Droid Run I entering playoffs, we're going to get started discussing our next tournament by leaving it up to the community for which tournament they would like to do. Droid Run is not an option this time around because we just completed a droid run tournament. The options are Drop Zone, Cargo, and Blast. DLC game modes are not going to be on the list (extraction) due to not being sure how successful it will be and I will look into doing one in the future. I know people have been wanting one. Regardless, the voting is now up on the website and will be available for all players to vote once on until April 15. Then signups will start.

I agree with multi mode as well. I wouldn't want to say best of 5 but it could be possible. One droid run, one drop zone, and one cargo. With regards to map selection, I would like to propose something new, I think that every week the maps for each game mode played should be predetermined for all the teams. An example is something like Week 1: Drop Zone will take place on ice caves, cargo on station, and droid run on goazan. Week 2: DZ on depot, cargo on hangar, droid run on raider, so on and so forth. This will require teams to getting to learn all maps and not restricting the pool of maps. All maps and seeding should be randomized imo.

For those of you asking about a multi-mode event, we are at a point where we already have 43 votes. I think it is too late to include a multi-mode event in this poll. At this time I also think that in order for multi-mode to be on the poll, its mode selection process should be worked out first so players know what they are voting for. So working this out would also include the map and faction selection process too, whatever that may be. I have had some ideas in the past about this and I will post them, but first I will respond to some of you guys.

iiGoHamOnYou wrote:I propose that we include a Multi mode tournament selection for this vote. What I mean by that is Droid Run, Cargo and Dropzone are all played consecutively in a best of 5 map series.

The hard part if you do it this way is determining what order to place the modes. Whatever mode the last map is winds up carrying more weight in a sense, and its hard to say which mode this should be without making an arbitrary decision. This could be what we have to do and that could be fine, but also players can find that to be objectionable depending on the order and their preferences. Also there's the other side of it where the first 3 modes are more important than the final 2 in 3-0 best of 5 matches. The final modes would get played less often in sweeps and since everything is an odd number I don't think it could be balanced perfectly.

Reviem wrote:With regards to map selection, I would like to propose something new, I think that every week the maps for each game mode played should be predetermined for all the teams. An example is something like Week 1: Drop Zone will take place on ice caves, cargo on station, and droid run on goazan. Week 2: DZ on depot, cargo on hangar, droid run on raider, so on and so forth. This will require teams to getting to learn all maps and not restricting the pool of maps.

So this is an idea that I would not use as is, but if you tweaked it I think it could be used. Let's say that for example we applied this idea as is to the Droid Run tournament we have going on right now. Teams already do not play this video game very often. More than half of the 24 group stage matches happened in week 2. If we divided the group stage into 2 weeks with different preset map picks then teams could just abuse this by playing their tournament matches even less promptly than they already are, which would be very bad. They could purposefully not play during a certain week to get the maps they want. That being said if you were to adjust your idea to be certain maps during certain stages or rounds I can see that being used. For example X maps for group stage, Y maps for quarterfinals, Z maps for semifinals, etc. That could work out. I can foresee a problem arising with how exactly we preset the maps, but it is viable.

Reviem wrote:All maps and seeding should be randomized imo.

Isn't randomizing the maps for each match the opposite of your previous point or am I reading this wrong? In terms of randomizing the seeds, this is something I can say for sure that we would not do for a multi-mode event including Drop Zone, Cargo, and Droid Run. The purpose of seeding is to prevent very strong teams from meeting in the first round or being in the same group. Should the Warriors play the Spurs in the first round of the NBA playoffs? Seeding also ensures that placings matter a little bit more. For instance seeding (and doing double elimination) ensures that the actual second best team meets the best team in grand finals. So you can gain more insight from looking at all the placings. If seeds were random, it becomes more likely that teams eliminated in the early rounds are not necessarily worse than teams eliminated in the later rounds, and thus their placing might not accurately reflect their skill as compared to the other teams. The only certain placing in an unseeded single elimination bracket is first place. Basically never expect us to use random seeding unless its the first tournament on a brand new game, or the mode / rules are so different that similar competitions couldn't be used for seeding.

I would actually prefer that seeds did not do anything other than bracket / group placement so that we didn't need them for anything but that, but there is almost always an odd number of things to give out whether it be mode picks, map picks, or faction picks no matter what format is done, and there needs to be a way to determine who gets that tiny advantage that almost inevitably exists. We can eliminate some of these but best of 3 and 5 lead to something that is leftover most of the time.